In Phase 1, you notice little bumpy clusters hugging the corners of the window-panes.  Then you notice the bumpy clusters are alive.  They are wee bundles of ladybugs, all piled on top of one another like tiny Ikea ballrooms of bugness.  They are sleepy and stumbly and they burrow into the pile with all the sweet charm of tiny sleepy things.  They are round little bumbling Swiss-dotted sweeties.  Aw. Let them sleep there, the funny dears.

This is the Tribble phase, where you are living cheek-by-jowl with another life form that vastly outnumbers you, but you soothe your primal instincts by telling yourself that they’re relatively harmless and kind of cute.  Despite having seen Star Trek, Gremlins I through III and the part in Jurassic Park where the fat guy lets his guard down around the big-eyed baby dinosaur and then gets his face ripped off, you decide to let the poor drowsy ladybugs have their sleepy-byes.

In Phase 2, you wake up to a particularly sunny day.  The sun peeps through the windows, shyly brushing its warm, buttery lashes against the glass at first and then boldly toasting it gloriously golden by midday.  As you bask in the toasty goodness, you notice the previously dormant ladybugs are being prodded into movement by the temperature spike.  They rouse themselves from their winter torpor, blink with watery eyes at the unseasonable brightness and crossly start off in search of their slippers or a glass of water.  They disperse across the windowpanes.  Some of them ambitiously start flying in erratic loops.  They unbunch themselves from their tight-packed, polka-dotted pyjama-party formations and somehow triple their volume in a buzzy, crawly diaspora.  It’s like watching clowns tumble out of a Volvo.  Jesus Christ, that’s a lot of bugs in my house, you think to yourself uneasily.

Now, evolution has gifted ladybugs with a colourful candy coating. Where other insects grew bitey things at one end or stingy things at the other to protect themselves, ladybugs grew a bright and cheerful shell to hide the revolting bugness that’s going on underneath. This allows them to move among humans without fear of being squished or swatted.

But when they start flying around, playtime is over.  The glossy, candy coating cracks open to reveal fly wings on an ugly black beetle and suddenly your apartment is no longer a pint-sized nature preserve for everybody’s favourite buggy-wug, it’s the attic from the Amityville Horror.

Next is Phase 3.  The exterminator comes to your house.  He is a very affable fellow who stares up at your tall, draughty, ill-fitting English windows and tells you he can spray some poison on these ladybugs, but more will just pour through the cracks and holes of the 100-year-old casements.  Spray the goddamn poison, you tell him. He also helpfully pokes around on the roof and informs you that the reason there are so many ladybugs in your apartment is because squirrels are using the crawlspace as a toilet, and ladybugs just love squirrel pee.  You nod wisely as the exterminator tells you this, confident that you can Google ladybugs + squirrel urine later and figure out what he’s talking about but your search will reveal nothing except that maybe your exterminator has been drinking.

Phase 4 happens a few hours later, when the poison goes to work on the ladybugs and they start evacuating the window frames and showing up in unexpected places doing scary David Byrne impressions.  You will be reading a book and one of them will randomly drop into your lap and get its freak on.  You skitter from room to room, trying to avoid the black rain of convulsing insects. The effect is biblical.

Phase 5 is when you wake up the next morning to a ladybug recreation of the Battle of Gettysburg.  Their little upturned bodies litter the carpet.  The occasional filament-like leg fans the air in feeble surrender.  Your partner sweeps them all up and tips them into a plastic bag with a dry, pattering sound and then you sit down to breakfast and acknowledge, hunched over your bowls of muesli, that you are both going to Buddhist hell.